


Hope (or something a little bit like it)

by storminormin



Category: Trollhunters (Cartoon)
Genre: Dictatious' adventures in the darklands, For the Glory of Fandom, Gen, Loss of hope, and by adventures i mean fighting to survive, dictatious has very conflicting emotions about his brother and the human he apparently adopted, gunmar approves of violence, jim shows up only to get brained by a staff, sometimes life be like that, three guys get loss of life just a heads up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 01:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13447566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storminormin/pseuds/storminormin
Summary: Being left to die affects you like that





	Hope (or something a little bit like it)

**Author's Note:**

> Even the word hopeless isn’t void of hope.  
> ~Dictatious Galadrigal

  They had done it, accomplished the impossible.

  They had sealed Gunmar away in the darklands where he could never return unless the trollhunter herself broke the seal - and she would never, as long as she lived- and the story would be passed down of the great doom trapped behind the bridge. How with Deya’s hand and his general’s betrayal, Gunmar the Black had been defeated, and through the bridge he and his remaining army had fallen, likely to leave only dark stories of what awaits under the bridge, to any who foolishly seek it.

  Trolls were long-lived, and held their grudges fiercely, and the amount of malice that had generated during Gunmar’s war of terror could keep the bridge closed for a few thousand years in the least. The likelihood of the bridge being opened within his own lifetime was well past the perimeters of possibility.

  Which was why his camp was positioned strategically to where he could see the bridge at all times.

  Gunmar wanted absolutely nothing to do with the remaining hunk of crumbled stones, so that put Dictatious in the safest place possible at the moment.

  So there was where he would wait.

\--O--

The waiting bled into days….weeks…

  When he sensed that he was courting danger to remain near the bridge, he gathered his few possessions, stopping at the bridge to run his hand over the amulet circle -marks and scratches memorized- and planned never to come back.

  He didn’t hope. It was foolish.

  He gave a final look over his shoulder as he made his way farther into the darkness, but the bridge remained silent and still behind him, not unlike a tombstone.

  Dictatious didn’t care for the analogy.

\--O--

Months passed.

Or somewhere in that timeframe.

He’d stopped keeping track, stopped ticking the estimated days down when he ran out of space in his book, the rest of the writing in it too precious to think of scratching over. It was a simple catalog of days, a war journal, full of different strategies and troop positions. His looped writing filled the pages, along with the heavy strokes of Deya from their war meetings, and the frenzied but neat scrawl of his brother.

  It was his one solace from the endless darkness, keeping him sane by displaying the writings of his kind, proof of his life on the surface. He use to erase 90% of Blinkous’ rambling scribbles because of how badly it meshed with the rest of the writing. Blinkous never wrote right side up. Or inside the margins. And he stabbed the paper. But Dictatious clung to those messages, their voices pushing the reality of the darklands back just a bit farther in his mind, getting him past another estimated day.

\--O--

They had taken his book.

  He sat in the dungeon, battered and furious at himself for his carelessness.

Terrified.

  Captured by Gunmar. He had seen this coming, but hadn’t thought ahead to what his plans might be should it ever come to pass. It was too late now. Too late for anything- not that there had ever been the possibility of a rescue.

He couldn’t quite keep the whine from escaping his throat.

 

There had once been a thought, an idea. That maybe there was some end to the waiting, a light at the end and such. But it had faded.

He had been left for dead.

He curled up on the hard ground, and for the first time in months, sobbed.

\--O--

He was slammed ruthlessly over and over into the stony ground as Gunmar demanded answers, another pathway, another bridge -anything Deya’s strategist should know. Roaring and grasping for a way out like some mad beast, searching for an escape. Dictatious would have laughed at how desperate the great warlord sounded if he himself didn’t feel the same crushing bleakness.

No one was coming for him.

He was just as trapped as Gunmar.

Foggy and delirious from the pain, he laughed anyway.

\--O--

  After what seemed like hours, Gunmar had given up on turning him into rubble, and Dictatious was content with letting the guards drag him back to his cell so he could collapse in a heap on the floor and not move for hours. One of the guards brought him a bandage for his arm. He did not care.

  Dictatious no longer believed in hope.

\--O--

  Dictatious was hunched over, arms over knees, sitting in Gunmar’s dungeon. He was going to be obliterated tomorrow. There was no way around it. He rubbed his lower left arm, hoping to soothe some of the aching soreness from it. He let out a small hiss through gritted teeth, and tightened the bandage.  
  Tomorrow he would be thrown into the arena to fight to the death for sport. And he would die.

  Moisture dripped steadily somewhere outside his cell.

  Settling his arm carefully, he curled up and glowered into the darkness beyond the crystalline bars.

  This was stupid.

  His hands curled into fists, making him wince, but he didn’t care. He had survived the war for the surface lands. He had survived months alone in the darklands. He had even survived hours of torture with Gunmar.

  He refused to die pointlessly in an arena for sport.

  Standing up stiffly, he studied the glowing orange spears keeping him trapped, he knew there wasn’t any way through, but….

  He sat, bracing himself against a crevice in the wall, and kicked out sharply, not for freedom, but for insurance.

\--O--

  
  And insurance it proved to be, as he drove the hidden shard through the surprised throat of his enemy. Through pure will to survive it was driven several inches into the thick neck, and stone immediately started webbing its way through the troll, leaving Dictatious laying on his back with a stone corpse leering above him, and the gathered crowd in deathly silence.

  He tucked the shard away again as he was dragged back into his cell.

 

 

  It wasn’t fear keeping him going.

  The crowd called for blood. The gladiator raised his remaining hand for mercy, but Dictatious showed none, driving the shard into his eye at the heady roar of the crowd around him. He brandished the sticky shard aloft and roared with them. No, it wasn’t fear running through him, fueling him to push for survival.

  It was anger.

  His luck would run out eventually. Everyone’s did. His ran out under a bridge months ago and he was running off of rage and desperation that could only end with his death in the arena. He needed to find somewhere safe. And as he watched the crowd chanting for another bout, -Gunmar looking on, his right hand next to him, farthest away from the fighting- he found just the place.

  Gunmar abhorred weakness. Culled his own army of it regularly in the arena, his right hand always at his side.

And Dictatious was going to murder him.

\--O--

 He never saw it coming. Gunmar saw, but watched on silently, ruthless appraisal in his eyes as he stared down at his counselor caught in a chokehold, his own knife held at his throat. Dictatious ignored the pleas for help underneath the blade. He kept his eyes on Gunmar’s glowing blue one, not in challenge, but in demonstration. He jerked the blade back and the weight in his arms deadened.

  Gunmar nodded approvingly.

  Hope wasn’t worth anything. It held you up to the light long enough for it to take hold in your mind, then shoved your head back down into the mud for daring to believe in its taunting warm glow. Dictatious didn’t believe in hope.

He believed in insurance.

 

 

\--O--

His nose was lying, it must have been smashed one to many times. He could smell Blinky. Strange how that scent was somehow still familiar to him, even after hundreds of years.

  He was led to the new trollhunter, who was held down by two guards -as ridiculous as it seemed, holding down this tiny creature, but Dictatious hadn’t made it this far by being careless-. The trollhunter was fighting wildly against the hands that held him, the rush of his flight to the bridge fueling his rage. His face was still that of a child, and he smelled of the darklands and fear.

  But he absolutely _reeked_ of Blinky.

Perhaps the years apart had heightened his senses toward anything that wasn’t of the darklands. Or maybe despite distancing himself from everything that reminded him -the smell had hung on in his mind. Because it smelled like home. It smelled like books and ink, like library dust and his favorite mead and their mother and home- and he felt something uncurl inside of him, something a little like hope.

  And he hated it.

He saw the half second flash of recognition in the trollhunter’s eyes, then the realization - _not Blinky not Blinky_ \- and his fate was sealed. Because in that half second he saw everything that Blinky had given the boy, something so sweet his cruel smile instinctively curled into a partial snarl because that closeness -that bond- wasn’t his anymore, and this flesh bag didn’t deserve it.

Even striking the youth unconscious didn’t fill the black pit growing in his chest. He ordered the guards to take the boy to the cells, and he strode stiffly away - FAR away- from the boy who Blinky had poured himself into, away from the blue-eyed half second of bared hope-

The force of his punch cracked the wall as he screamed.

\--O--

The guard’s whispered message halted as two of Dictatious’ hands clenched harshly around his arm.

_He came._

He unclenched them and ordered the boy to the crucible, splitting off from the group and heading down a different passage, his steps entirely on autopilot.

_He finally came._

The guards must have seen the dark roiling thoughts in his eyes because no questions were asked as he walked with unwavering purpose.

He didn’t know what he’d wanted to find on his brother’s face as he strode forward, but the look of abject horror- and dawning realization- that poured over Blinky’s face, dropping his arms at his sides and leaving him looking all of four years old again… That wasn’t anything near what he’d wanted to find.

He didn’t want to feel like he’d just found his brother again. Because he had, he’d found him after all those years, because Blinky had finally come.

_But he hadn’t come for him._

\--O--

There had once been a thought, an idea. An intangible concept of finished waiting. And somewhere threaded within the red and yellow striped package-

 

 

 

There was hope.


End file.
